Remember the Post about the LARGE quartz vein we found up the hill from our current dig site. Here is a picture of a grab sample off of the vein, we kept this one because it is a very neat quartz specimen with great crystal formation. This chunk is about 9″ long and about 5″ wide, very pretty. It took a little work to get it cleaned up, but it was worth it. It has now joined the ranks with the rest of my specimens on the shelf.
One day we decided to take a break from digging and do some more exploring of the claim. We decide to walk up the mountain from where we were digging and found a large outcropping of bedrock. At first glance it did not look very significant, other than it was a large shelf with 75 feet exposed, it looked like a giant step. We walked around this outcropping inspecting is closer and as we started to pull the moss off of the face of the rock we uncovered a very large quartz vein with tons of stringers running all through the formation. We kept pulling off moss and kept uncovering more and more quartz. My mother-in-law found a loose piece of quartz and pulled it loose, it was a beautiful crystalline quartz specimen. We are very suspect that this quartz is the source for the gold we are currently finding, The plan is to send out a few grab samples for assay, wish us luck. Who love’s rocks…….I do! I do!